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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a vital congressional authority, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; the president, in the past few months, has asserted additional of that control for his administration, authorizing military actions on boats in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse appears to be largely been taken away from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the ability to allocate federal funds has also shifted to the presidency, with the White House asserting the ability to cancel congressionally authorized spending and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any laws, either; virtually all bills must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge perennial essential omnibus legislation that can circumvent the filibuster. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens notice. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch continues humming along.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can seem somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans care who holds a controlling share in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging may assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 succeed

And yet Proposition 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could provide five more House seats to the Democratic Party if it is approved by voters in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the political imagination of progressives nationwide. In part, it is a belated response to trends happening elsewhere: GOP-led states have for a long time adopted extreme biased redistricting while large blue states such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their maps via nonpartisan redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has led to closely divided control of the House and a long-term sense, by Democrats, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The state proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that recently passed in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide Republicans an additional five positions in the state congressional delegation next year; similar redistricting moves are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are also following California’s lead in attempting to redistrict.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters react with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of authority and look for ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics warn that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a retaliatory pattern in which Republican-controlled states do additional to draw their maps so as to foreclose any chance of Democratic competitiveness. Others have critiqued the proposal on more purely ideological democratic grounds: a district that is created in such a manner that the outcome of the vote is not in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, inevitably, that the power of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the procedure of debate, argument and persuasion that is meant to characterize a functioning democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The initial critique, that Prop 50 will spur the right to alter their own maps in response, does not hold up as a logical argument: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be made to act in antidemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those steps. The Republican party, I would observe, has not needed any incentive of retaliation to redraw maps that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of similar actions by the left, for years.

The second objection, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic wish for a distinct nation than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be distasteful to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack disfavored demographics; it is harmful for politicians to select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are made noncompetitive. That these measures have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian advance of Trump’s power and reduce the amount of harm he is capable to cause is sad; it is a sign of how much we have declined from something more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch fails to in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new blue house members will be sent to the capital to do? One aspect that the House and Senate still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the power to examine. Even in our era of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s new representatives are sworn in, they will become a member of a institution with the power to investigate the president, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s significant, and more importantly, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer